Posts Tagged time travel
Back Dated has been updated!
Posted by Chris Niblock in writing fiction/humour on February 7, 2012
Back dated has been completely revised and edited to eliminate the typos mentioned by some reviewers of the first edition.Only £1.99 ($2.99 in the USA) and for Prime members it’s absolutely FREE!
“Back Dated has an original and interesting plot that engages the reader very quickly and holds them right up to the end. Niblock maintains tension and interest throughout and Ray Flaxman is a flawed but interesting character. This is a book from an author with great potential.”
Jill Murphy – The Bookbag
Synopsis: In the post crash Britain of 2009, the state of the economy is the least of sci-fi writer Ray Flaxman’s problems. His fiancée Francesca is pushing him to set a date for their wedding; an unknown admirer is bombarding him with love letters, and he’s not going to meet the deadline for completing the last of his Halgaar trilogy of novels.
Returning to London after a romantic weekend in Oxford with Francesca, Ray is dismayed to find his flat has been ransacked. When he discovers only the love letters and a photo of his fiancée have been taken he fears his little secret is about to be made public. Matters become even more complicated when a strange young woman claiming to have come from the future, turns up at the flat and demands Ray get her pregnant – again!
At first Ray dismisses her wild claims as the ravings of a deranged fantasist but then the girl mysteriously disappears. After a bruising encounter with her formidable mother, and her violent henchman, Ray begins to take the girl’s story far more seriously.
As the odds against him mount, Ray is forced to confront a future in which men are facing extinction and women no longer need them. A reluctant hero, Ray has to step up to the plate to save not only himself and the girl, but the rest of the male species.
Memorable Quotes
“In the lounge, the entire contents of a large bookcase had been thrown out onto the floor. Spines broken, dust covers ripped off, the precious volumes lay there like a flock of birds with broken wings.”
“She was so close, I could see the tiny beads of perspiration that had gathered in the notch at the base of her throat, the quickened beat of her heart pulsing in a vein in her neck. Our eyes caught and held for a moment, then each of us, embarrassed by this shared moment of intimacy, turned away and busied ourselves with other matters.”
“One look into their eyes and I knew I was in big trouble: there was nothing there. It was like gazing into the eyes of the dead. Testosterone oozed from every pore and fibre, reminding me of those Russian female shot putters and javelin throwers from the Cold War period, whose gender couldn’t be determined, even after exhaustive scientific tests. Bond got Pussy Galore. I’d got the ugly sisters, but there would be no pantomime play acting from these two: these ‘Ladies’ meant business.”
Just click on the links below the smaller pic of the book’s cover on the right and it will take you straight to Back Dated’s page on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.
Don’t have a Kindle? No problem, Amazon thoughtfully provide FREE App’s which enable you to download my eBook onto an iPad, iPhone and similar devices, or onto your laptop or PC. You can even read the first couple of chapters for Free before buying! So, what have you got to lose?
Now available in the epub format from Smashwords and Kobo.
If you are an author yourself, and you’re looking for someone to format your book for you, I can thoroughly recommend a fellow author and eBook formatter, Tim C. Taylor. You will find a link to his site at the foot of the list of links to my novel.
The man who invented the Time Machine
Posted by Chris Niblock in science fiction on August 1, 2011
Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), along with Jules Verne (1828-1905) is generally regarded as the father of science fiction, though it could be argued that the young Mary Shelley beat them both to it with the publication in 1818 of her novel Frankenstein.
The novel came to be written as the result of a competition between herself, her lover, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, to see who could write the best horror story. Frankenstein nevertheless has at its core some of the basic elements of science fiction: the fanatical scientist who pushes science too far and in doing so, creates a monster he cannot control.
But it was H.G. Wells more than anyone else, who in four of his best known novels established the basic ingredients of the science fiction genre, though he preferred to call them scientific romances.*
Time travel and the dystopian future: The Time Machine (1895).
The egotistical scientist who overreaches himself: The Invisible Man (1897).
Alien Invasions: The War of the Worlds (1898).
Space Travel: The First Men in the Moon (1901).
H.G. Wells wasn’t the first writer to feature time travel in a story but he was the first to use the term Time Machine. In a career spanning sixty years, he was a prolific and sometimes prophetic writer of both fiction and non fiction, novels, short stories and articles. But it is for these four novels that he will be most remembered.
All four have been adapted for the cinema but it was another Wells – American actor and director Orson Welles, and his radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds which had the greatest impact on an audience. On the 30th October 1938, Halloween night, Welles directed and performed an updated version of the work as a series of simulated news bulletins, which had a section of the audience convinced that America was being invaded by Martians. Following the broadcast, Welles was castigated for cruelly deceiving his listeners but it made him famous.
*The term science fiction was coined in 1851 but didn’t really catch on until the 1930’s when it was popularised by the American editor Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the first science fiction magazine Amazing Stories in 1926. The Annual Science Fiction Achievement Awards, the ‘Hugo’s’ are named after him.
If you enjoy reading about Time Travel check out my novel Back Dated. Just click on the links to the right of this page and they will take you to my amazon home page, where you can read the first three chapters for FREE!
Chris Niblock
A Stirring in the Blood
Buy it from amazon.co.uk
A Kyndle in the Mynd 